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Sunday, June 23, 2013

Superman's 75th: Man of Steel spoiler-less-ish impressions and a bunch of Superman stuff!

My Superman month-long celebration is about to wrap up but boy oh boy what a great final leg it has been!

The wife and I were able to catch a 10:15 show this past Friday night for Man of Steel at a nearby theater. We are very thankful for my sister-in-law being able to babysit for us that night. And what a night it was!

I won't spoil anything in the Man of Steel movie for anyone, but I really, really enjoyed it! Please do not let any horrible metacritic or rotten tomatoes scores dissuade you from watching this movie! Go in watch it for yourself and judge then.

I have no idea why the hate for this movie is so strong, because it was AWESOME in my opinion. I'm a DC guy so I'm pretty biased, but I enjoyed it much more than Iron Man 3 or the Avengers (yep, I said it!). I may have to rank it up there as one of my top superhero movies and it could go toe-to-toe with the Chris Reeve Supermans (gasp)! But it's a VERY different movie from that one, so the Donner movies will always be up there too!

The movie was EPIC through and through. Everything was so grand, so awesome and so SUPER! The wife enjoyed it too... having Henry Cavill play the man of Steel certainly didn't hurt her opinion! All the supporting actors worked well, with Ma and Pa Kent being solid believable characters, Lois Lane by Amy Adams was great, and Russel Crowe as Jor-El was good too! The soundtrack was great too by the way!

This next paragraph MIGHT be a spoiler (you'd have to really do some digging to figure out what I'm saying) so skip it and come back to it after you've watched the movie! There's this 'controversy' surrounding a plot point in the movie, that seems to be a BIG reason why people poo poo on it. And apparently big time Superman fans are weighing and really hating on it. I would like to think I'm a relatively large Superman fan myself, but I didn't have an issue with it like others. For one thin, I've actually read a story that dealt with the same controversy in the comics, so I suppose I was ready to 'accept' it? But my rebuttal to the controversy is: Go watch Superman 2 with Christopher Reeve. It has the same controversy everyone is hung up on, and it's handled a whole lot more unnervingly there. That's all I'll have to say about that!

There's complaints that there's no joy or comedy in the movie... maybe not in the same vein as the Donner movies that really went for the old school comic book comedy (which is awesome), but there's humor and joy in the movie for sure. The wife and I found ourselves chuckling at certain moments of the film, but the delivery is more subtle that the Donner films. Different films, different tone.

And lastly, people actually complain that there's too much action in the movie. Too much action in a Superman movie? Didn't superman debut in a comic called ACTION comics #1?? Whatever, people. I loved the action scenes in the movie!

Okay, enough gushing about Man of Steel, let's gush about other things Superman related! I got Superman Unchained #1 by Scott Snyder and Jim Lee. The book has a 'gimmick" fold out poster page included that is actually part of the narrative. I have to say I actually kinda like the gimmick! My teenaged self would have absolutely gone gaga over it. After watching Man of Steel's epic fight scenes, for better or for gimmicky- worse, I absolutely appreciated Jim Lee trying to capture that grandness in Unchained.

My collector-nerd tendencies came out again asI was trying to pry the glue off of this thing!

Jim Lee's able to show just how gigantic a task Superman is doing; making the scene grander than a two page spread. And for a Superman comic? I think that's pretty appropriate. It costs you an extra dollar, but I don't think I minded, so long as it's not a regular occurance! It was a good way to start the series off with a bang. Scott Snyder's writing is great too. He gives us a solid Clark internal monologue where he's trying to describe to you what it feels like being superman but in very human terms.

Snyder has a nice 2 page epilogue with Dustin Nguyen providing the art. It's written well, that even though it's only two pages, he's able to give us nice backstory on Perry White and the current plot at the same time without it feeling bogged down.

Next up, I got my Blu-ray edition of Superman Unbound (must be some 'Un' theme going on for supes)in the mail. I enjoyed this movie even though I had some intitial hangups with it. It was nice to have a physical copy in my nerd-hands! I have my impressions of it in a previous post here.

Along with that, I also got my copy of the Jose Luis Garcia Lopez Adventures of Superman collection. I heard a complaint that it wasn't quite Garcia Lopez's best stuff, but flipping through it, there's some good art in this collection! I mean Garcia Lopez on an off day is still good looking stuff! I'm jazzed to read through this book.